Friday, May 11, 2007

My first day in Beijing, I took a bus from the train station to Tiananmen Square and looked for a hotel south of there.

The square is impressively huge, much bigger than any other open plaza I've ever seen. The north end is dominated by Tiananmen with its huge portrait of Chairman Mao.

After I dropped my bag off at the hostel, I went back to Tiananmen Square to visit the Forbidden City which used to be the home of the emperor. It has been restored and converted into a museum. Here's the main entrance.

The architecture inside is everything I expected it to be: restored traditional Chinese buildings

with lots of different levels

and fancy bridges too.

Inside the museum, you can get some sense of what life used to be like in the palace. This is a picture of what an imperial audience would have looked like:

And the chair he would have sat in:

A close-up of mushrooms on another banner:

Some concubines' dresses

For transportation:

There were also parts of the museum dedicated to imperial learning, including this sutra written in both seal and common script,

these geometric figures,

this machine to distill water,

and this astronomical model.

The ceramics collection was made up of impressive walls of pieces of ceramics made throughout history in different Chinese kilns.

Yixing clay teapots were also on display.

Outside, you had to be careful of the lion in the cage.

When I left the Forbidden City, I was amazed again by the sheer immensity of Tiananmen Square.